My top site just recently started slipping

[JROC777]

Hey warriors,

Would really appreciate any help and advice with this. My top site just recently started slipping in the search engines after ranking page 1 top five for the last 5 years. I believe this is a result of new competition but also this was one of my first sites so there’s plenty of upgrading I can do.

I haven’t messed around with the site for quite some time (kinda afraid to mess it up) but now it’s time to make some changes.

Questions:

1) I have 19 pages ranked in Google along with Google sitelinks these pages are named things like mydomain.com/23.html
I believe I could improve them by changing the url ext name in addition to on page and off page seo of course but would a meta redirect be ok to direct Google to the new page location when they crawl it?

2) Should the articles I personally write for the site be submitted to multiple article directories after they are indexed on my site or does this hurt seo like duplicate content

I’m also looking for some suggestions for best practices for seo or recomendations on what else I can do. just to make sure I’m on the right track with what I’m doing.

[ninaE]

You really want to make sure all redirects are 301 redirects, this means they will pass on any link juice to the new URL

For articles, normally I will publish the article on my own site and wait for it to be indexed. Once this has beed done then I build some links to it (usually socialmonkee) and then submit it to ezine etc.

If you are submitting to ezine etc just for the backlink, then I would change the title and opening sentence so the two articles are not directly competing over a keyword.
Once your article has been indexed though it is essential to get some backlinks to it!

[barbling]

Is this a blog site or a static site?

Do you use categories that contain keywords/related keywords etc.?

Is it a local site, a generic site?

Depending upon the answers to the above, you have several avenues to pursue. Good luck!

[writerforhire]

I can relate to your problem! I have a PR4 site that's been online since 2000, and I recently slipped 7-10 positions in Google for several major keyword phrases that had been in the top 3 spots for a while. I frequently make changes to my home page, so it's difficult to pinpoint the problem. A couple of my many guesses relate to duplicate content issues or excessive keyword density. I've been working to fix those problems. We'll see what happens!

[kkchoon]

First of all, check and make sure your site is just slipped in ranking, not totally remove from index by Google, use the site:yourdomain.com to check and see if pages still there, then use info:yourdomain.com to check if the record is still there.

If all is good, next, you need to continue building more backlinks. But before doing that, check your Google webmaster tool and fix all the problems before starting any link building campaign.

Google filter a lot of backlinks lately, most probably this hit your site as well, so rebuilding those backlinks should bring your ranking back.

[JROC777]

Originally Posted by barbling

Is this a blog site or a static site?

Do you use categories that contain keywords/related keywords etc.?

Is it a local site, a generic site?

Depending upon the answers to the above, you have several avenues to pursue. Good luck!

This is a static site that focuses on a market in Canada

Thanks